All week I’ve been thinking about the house we looked at on Sunday. The half-moon shape of the master bedroom window. The high wainscoting in one of the smaller bedrooms. The neutral paint on the walls, well-chosen colors, but not too bland. High ceilings in the front room, skylight in the hall bathroom, backyard full of trees. I think we really do want it. We should make an offer. We have the down payment and we’re pre-approved. It’s scary, it’s glorious, it’s exciting, and it’s scary. I am still looking for full-time work, but Brian is as stable and steady as ever.
It’s another very quiet and gray day. I worked on the book this morning, continuing a rewrite I started last night at the coffee shop with pen and paper. I asked myself if I am holding something back in this story, if it could be more compelling in the visceral details. I really don’t know. I don’t know anything. So I took one of the earliest chapters, written in the third person, and from memory only, rewrote it in the first person. I loved how it turned out, but I don’t think it would work throughout the whole book. Or would it? That’s what I mean about not knowing anything.
Ugh, I know what you mean about the book. I’ve been struggling with the choice between first and third person lately. When I write, first person just sounds so…childish, but I like different perspectives. Let’s just say that I don’t know anything either. :/
There are pros and cons to both. I struggled and went back and forth a lot too. In this instance, I took what I had written in the 1st-p and converted it back to 3rd-p again, which I also liked. My concern is with maintaining that consistent voice in this character, who experiences many traumatic changes in his life. I just don’t know if I could successfully pull it off, and in the 3rd person, it really is fine. Maybe I just wanted to mix it up a little.
I just now remembered the other advantage to writing in the third person: richness of detail. If you’re writing in a character’s voice, there is the problem of losing description and detail, because people don’t usually “talk” the way that an omniscient narrator would, know what I mean?